Black House, Bleecker Street

Armin Landeck

By the 1970s Armin Landeck, with nearly five decades of intaglio printmaking under his belt, had found the stride of exploration in his style and subject matter. Though images of urban scenes and architecture were nothing new to him, he now had the freedom to depart from the intensely precise compositions - which vacillated between the real and the purely abstract - he was known for and try his hand at something more visually playful.

In “Black House, Bleecker Street,” the clearly delineated thick-to-thin linework of the sky becomes a stylized framing of the painted building; rounded shapes are repeated in cast shadows and light, contrasting with the otherwise ruler-straight lines of the architecture. The scene becomes an elegantly formal rendering of an everyday city corner.

According to Landeck, this building, which is no longer standing, was really a black house. It was on the corner of Bleecker and West Broadway in Manhattan.